Shining a Light on Beijing’s Deadly ‘Black Ambulances’

While China’s fake Apple stores and counterfeit luxury goods may leave some consumers feeling cheated, another product of the country’s ersatz economy is putting lives at risk: illegal ambulances.

According to a report in the state-owned Global Times, unlicensed ambulances are growing in number and are in many cases contributing to the deaths of patients. Most do not come equipped with proper medical equipment or trained medical professionals, the report said, adding that in some cases sick people are re-directed to substandard private clinics hundreds of kilometers away.

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Beijing’s Great Hall of the People is reflected in the window of an ambulance.

The report does not outline specific data on the growth in so-called “black ambulances” but says an Internet search for “ambulance rental companies” produced two million results.

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It is illegal for individuals or non-medical companies to buy or operate an ambulance in China, according to the newspaper.

The rise of unauthorized emergency services underscores persistent deficiencies in China’s health care system, despite government efforts to improve it. China’s leaders have spent $125 billion to provide basic insurance to 95% of the population. Yet while citizens may now have a way to pay for some of their health care, they’re still plagued with systemic problems within hospitals themselves—a lack of doctors, improper equipment and insufficient ambulances.

Private companies have moved in to fill the holes in the health-care system, yet not all are properly staffed and many have been accused of trying to make money at the expense of patient safety.

Last year, a privately run ambulance owner in the Chinese city of Wuhan was fined $28,900 after judges determined he contributed to the death of a man in need of heart surgery after he locked the patient in the vehicle and turned off the air conditioner during an argument with the patients’ relatives, the Global Times report said.

Beijing needs a total of around 600 ambulances, and is currently more than a hundred short of that number, according to a Jan. 21 report in the Communist Party-controlled Beijing Daily. Among the problems complicating the issue is the city’s legendarily bad traffic, which extends the amount of time ambulances spend on the road and reduces the number of trips they can take in a given day. One patient died last year after the ambulance she was in got stuck in traffic and took 40 minutes to travel three kilometers, the state-run English-language China Daily reported in December.

Public sentiment towards unregulated ambulances is overwhelmingly negative. Commenting on the issue on Wednesday, users of Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service expressed a clear preference for legal hospital services to the black market. Yet some seemed resigned to them given current circumstances. “The reasons these black ambulances exist is because regulated ambulances don’t meet demand,” one Weibo user in Beijing said,

Another user in Beijing was baffled by the lack of regulation, saying, “How is it that there are black ambulances? Isn’t the Ministry of Health managing this?”

Local governments claim to be cracking down on the black emergency services, according to the Global Times.

The report does not say if the government plans to increase funding to local hospitals.

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